Delhi in the early twentieth century was a city of many cities and a contested terrain: the object of European romantic imagery and denigration, the site of imperial destruction and, from the European perspective, improvement. The agendas of colonialism and the ideals of modernism encountered inherited structures and spatial practices in Delhi to create a fractured urbanism that de-familiarized the familiar, appropriated the new, and created the multiple conflicting landscapes of “modern” Delhi. The plural expressions of Delhi’s modernity also expressed the contradictions inherent in the planning interventions.

By the 1930s, signs of progress were everywhere in Delhi for those who perceived them as such. Wide paved roads, tramlines, regional linkages by rail lines and roads, bridges, electricity, piped water supply, underground sewage lines and treatment plants, factories and mills, a reorganized system of urban administration with clearly defined territories, by-laws, building codes, an organized police force, several large hospitals and a system of smaller dispensaries, colleges, schools, museums, and new retail centers were evident in the city. Above all was a shining new imperial city, New Delhi, three miles to the south of what increasingly became known as “Old” Delhi (Figure 11.1). Striking as these changes were, by 1946, after nearly a century of turmoil, the architecture and urbanism of Delhi remained patchy and at best “incomplete.” In its transformation into a “modern” city in the European mold its status was only tentative. Even where formal elements resembled those of Europe, in a reconstituted context the spatial culture – use, meanings, and practices – in which the buildings were embedded differed significantly.

In apparent contrast to the expansive new metropolis, the walled city seemed to become ever more congested, more haphazard, and more uncontrollable. The city had clearly outgrown its walled precincts. Immediately to the west of the walls, regardless of official enthusiasm to establish orderly extensions, spontaneous development continued. As the old city came to represent the limits of official visions of science and rationality, planned development of the government’s vast estates around the walled city promised to celebrate the transformative powers of reason. Between the two seemingly oppositional spaces developed an intermediate landscape of planned communities with tidy lots and identical units. Located on the outskirts of the old walled city of Delhi and the new imperial city of New Delhi, the new housing projects remained on the margins of both and, for long, largely neglected in scholarship on Delhi.1  From the perspective of European modernity,

the new residential developments formed a “modernizing” landscape: one that showed recognizable signs but was as yet incompletely “modern” in its advancement towards a predetermined end. This chapter explores the tenuous and tentative modernity of this landscape of housing. A close examination of the “improvement” projects reveals complex and contradictory perceptions and realities. Implicit in the development of new housing for the local population was the colonial view of a regulated and “modern” environment creating an obedient citizen free from the bonds of tradition. The imperial government’s drive to maximize profit conflicted with their agenda to “civilize” and “modernize.” From the perspective of European thought, science and rationality had unitary definitions and universal value. Scientific principles of planning and architectural design in their view would uplift and construct a unified subject population. However, not all sections of the citizenry were convinced of the powers of a singular science or the objectivity with which the principles were applied. Hidden agendas, political ambitions, and local customs of building and living countered British efforts to deliberately reshape Delhi’s landscape. The planned extensions and new developments that emerged from the “improvement” efforts resembled in many ways the familiar European and North American forms prevalent at the time. Yet, the negotiation of the concepts assumed to be universal with the particularities of local politics and culture made the familiar forms unique to Delhi. At a moment when all that was familiar was under change, residents too questioned customary ways of living and building and adapted them to the changing circumstances of Delhi. I have proposed elsewhere the concept of indigenous modernities as a way to understand the alternative and localized interpretations of an idealized and universal modernity.2 From this perspective, the multiple resolutions of these mediations were landscapes that were at once both indigenous and modern: the indigenous modernities of Delhi.

• 1. See Jyoti Hosagrahar, “Fractured Plans: Real Estate, Moral Reform, and the Politics of Housing in New Delhi, 1936–1941,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 11, no. 1, Fall 1999; see also Stephen Legg, “Colonial Governmentality: Spaces of Imperialism and Nationalism in India’s New Capital, Delhi 1911–47,” London: Blackwell, forthcoming (2007).
• 2. The concept is discussed in detail in Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities.